Thinking Outside Of The Box

For one of my larger affiliate sites, I get updated product info via an XML feed, and I use it in much the same way as every other affiliate in this niche. As such, it’s hard to rank well unless you have a HUGE budget (PPC, paid links, etc), or are extremely lucky.

How do you deal with this? Targeting the long tail works well, but that’s not always feasable or applicable.

A quote from Shawn Collins’ latest book Internet Marketing From The Real Experts made me take a different look at my marketing strategy. In it, they talked about a completely different way to market sports jerseys, by organizing them in a unique way.

Using that as my motivation, I re-organized some of my XML data on a new page, and posted a few basic backlinks to get the page indexed in the search engines. Nothing else.

Wanna know what happened? According to Google Analytics, this new page was the 2nd most visited page (out of 50K pages) for the month of March! (The homepage was the most visited page, as expected)

That’s a HUGE accomplishment, and just goes to show you what can happen when you think outside of the box!